In this first documentary film to access the literary and countercultural legacy of writer and performance artist Kathy Acker (1947-1997), director Barbara Casper gives us a mostly adulatory picture of the experiments Acker indulged in and the controversies she generated. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Manhattan, Acker is traced from her early forays in the New York literary underground of the 1970s with a series of experimental and sexually graphic self-published stories (informed by her gigs as a stripper and porn performer) to her heyday in the 1980s and 1990s as an admired writer, teacher and figure of punk feminism. The film is strongest when contextualizing Acker as a female artist. She is captured in interviews angrily and powerfully responding to the lack of tough female artists. (Acker believed that no previous writer had sufficiently articulated her rage against modern misogynistic, capitalistic society or presented her sexual and intellectual sensibilities.) Director Casper wisely juxtaposes Acker's interviews with those of her friends, students, lovers, supporters and critics, who parse her influences (Burroughs, Duras, Genet) and her destructive, brave and brazen behavior. "She was like a rock star whose meteoric rise was destined to fall," says her agent Ira Silverberg. "Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker" is not for everyone, but it is an important contribution to American feminist history.